The Baby Trade : Where There is Crushing Poverty in the Third World and a Baby Shortage in the First, Children Become a Commodity

SUZANNE LIPPS, slim and striking in a strapless blue swimsuit, raises her new baby high in joy against a fiery opal sky. In the distance, dry hills cry out for the rainy season to begin. But here, alongside a shimmering hotel pool, a waiter named Francisco serves a river of iced tea to Suzanne and her friends, parched from hours of talking among themselves and cooing to the dark-eyed infants they hold and rock and watch.

Among the women, all from the United States, 38-year-old Suzanne looks the freshest; she is the latest arrival. Four months from now, she will still be here--wiser, tired, a bona-fide citizen of the dark world of confusion and distress that becomes familiar ground to those who come to Honduras to adopt the children they cannot have at home.

Today, however, Suzanne can still joke charmingly about her first night as a mother. She was suffering allergic reactions from the shots “for everything” a doctor prescribed before her trip to Central America. Shortly after Suzanne checked in, an assistant to the Honduran lawyer engaged by her stateside adoption agency appeared, like a neighbor from the welcome wagon, and handed over 27-day-old Gabrielle.

“I woke up that night in the dark, thinking, ‘What am I going to feed her?’ (Enfamil with iron, it turned out, in the kitchenette.) Then I thought, ‘I had such a wonderful life back in Ohio. What have I done?’ ”

The women around her laugh.

Shirley Williams, adopting two children, is 50, and one of her three grown daughters back home is scheduled to have her own baby today. Nevertheless, here is Shirley, post-menopause, sending the bellboy out for a teething ring for 7-month-old Ali and rocking Zain, 5 months, on her knee. Shirley’s new husband, only 34, wanted a family, and Shirley had cancer (and a mastectomy) less than 10 years ago. That profile, she says, would disqualify them from adopting “even in Chile and Korea.”

Sue Cagle, another regular at the pool, came to Honduras out of a kind of desperation, too, “after five years of trying to have a baby and finding no way, then discovering we would need to wait five years to adopt in the States. I’ll be 41 by then.”

From wherever they stay in this dusty, unlovely capital city of Tegucigalpa, they come again and again to the white metal tables and lounge chairs around the pool at this hotel. On any given day, there may be two to six women like Suzanne, eating hamburgers or sunning themselves, waiting out the adoption bureaucracy, talking about their trips back and forth to the understaffed, slow-moving Social Welfare Ministry a few blocks away. For the adopting mothers, the hotel is an oasis in a desert of bewildering customs, delays and missed signals. They come here as if to a friendly club, wheeling babies in snappy strollers over cracked sidewalks or holding their infants in chic carrier packs, under the gaze of Honduran mothers who move slowly and cradle babies in their arms.

A few smoky pillars from a fire in the hills rise in the sky and spread into the atmosphere above the pool. There is silver in the hills, mined by men like Rawlings, who stops by today. Rawlings (an American who does not want his real name used) packs a gun, but he is always welcome because he reassures the women that they are saving the children they adopt from possible early death. Rawlings bears no responsibility for the babies on the laps of Suzanne and the others, but, like many foreigners--from aid-organization workers to Peace Corps volunteers--he has acted as an intermediary, unpaid he says, in placing Honduran children for adoption: 70 by his own account over the years.

“The women here who have babies close together--often they won’t nurse the youngest because they’ve only got so much strength, so they use it to nurse a 2- or 3-year-old who is a good bet to live but is not yet sufficiently over the hump,” he explains today.

Rawlings’ talk of babies is interwoven with information about the depth of a silver mine and how many hours it will take to fill with water if the pumps fail. Talk of the cost of feeding a pregnant woman (“Sometimes I’ll take care of them for months, and then they’ll decide not to give the baby up”) is mixed with talk of the price of surplus aircraft, in which he deals (“I’m looking at old Huey helicopters at half a million, but I know there are some Yugoslavian MIGs at $200,000”).

Suzanne will meet others in the coming months who will say privately that adoption of babies out of the Third World is an act of charity. But Rawlings is open about it. He believes his free-lance adoption brokering rescues the “Gillette babies,” so called because their uneducated mothers may slice their umbilical cords with any handy razor.

Suzanne doesn’t think she is rescuing anyone. She is clear about her own need and why she came here. For four years, since she married John Lipps, a successful telecommunications executive and inventor 13 years her senior, Suzanne did not get pregnant, even with the help of fertility shots that cost $1,500 a month. Like the other women at the pool, Suzanne looked to Honduras as a last hope.

“Open adoption laws are looming everywhere in the States, and we don’t want an adoption where the mother knows everything about you, and you’re expected to invite her to Thanksgiving dinner,” she says with uncharacteristic vehemence. “I don’t want to adopt the mother. Hey, you’re talking to an insecure person. That’s not my idea of a family. I never want to meet the birth mother, and I never want her to see my child.”

One of Suzanne’s new friends, Cathy Dickenson, 40, looks thin and nervous sitting under an umbrella with baby Kate, the weeks of waiting for paperwork to be completed chipping away at her “sanity.” She tells her own birth-mother story.

“When I went with the lawyer to pick up Kate--some part of town I could never find again--her mother was lying there, not in a house really, more like a stall with a bed in it, behind a watch-repair stand,” Cathy says. “It was like we were going baby shopping. She couldn’t speak English, and I couldn’t speak Spanish. I tried to tell her I would always love the child. I was already holding the baby. I embraced her, too. Then all of a sudden, I was crying so hard.”

LAST YEAR, AMERICANS unable or unwilling to adopt at home brought back to the United States about 8,000 children from 25 nations. Overwhelmingly, it is developing countries like Honduras that supply the children. In 1989, Asian countries, led by South Korea, supplied about 5,000; a few hundred came from Africa and the poorer European nations, and the rest--about 2,600 children--from Latin America. Every 40 hours an American adopted a child in Honduras.

Sergio Sanchez, legal counsel to the Honduran Adoption Department in 1987, has a euphemistically succinct explanation for the connection between his country and the United States: “We have an overpopulation problem, and you have an infertility problem. We’re like one family formed at the root by necessity.”

In fact, what Sanchez calls “overpopulation” stands for a series of problems that adds up to desperation, even for women with only one or two children. Honduras is an extremely poor country, and statistics show it is getting poorer. It has the second-highest rate of child mortality in Central America: Almost 10% of children die before they reach age 5, compared with about 1.3% in the United States. The majority of the population of 4.3 million live in the countryside, where fewer than half have access to drinkable water. Nationwide, about 53% of families are headed by women. Often, the women send their children to work when they are old enough to carry or count. Besides the children who buy, sell and labor for money or food, another 2,000 or so street kids subsist through begging and prostitution.

Given this bleak landscape, perhaps it’s not surprising that this country’s rules for adoption are among the least stringent in the world. The only application that the Social Welfare Ministry has turned down under Director of Adoptions Mariana De Nazar, who took office in February, was from an American couple who wanted eight children at once.

“I think,” says De Nazar, “they wanted to start a church.”

Before she became director of adoptions, De Nazar was an attorney who specialized in mercantile law. Now she directs a handful of social workers and psychologists whose job includes trying to determine if babies are freely relinquished and new parents are fit. In the end, however, the decision seems largely De Nazar’s, and nervous adopting parents tend to treat her in courtly fashion.

De Nazar’s office overlooks a dry, smelly river bed in Tegucigalpa. Below, children of 8 or 9 hawk merchandise on the bridge. Six young resistoleros , named for the glue they sniff to get high and ward off hunger, lie in a heap on the sidewalk, the bottoms of their feet the gray-black color of the asphalt on which they sleep. On the far side of the river, a sign in peeling paint advises, “Your children need you. Help them.”

Standing at her desk, De Nazar is in troubled consultation with an adoption lawyer who has promised a baby girl to an American couple. But Lilian Madrid, a humble-looking woman of about 50, has come to the office by bus from San Pedro Sula, near the Caribbean coast, to say the baby is hers. She is showing an identification card to prove it.

Madrid’s adult daughter, holding two of her own children, watches the spectacle calmly. Someone--it’s not clear who--”stole” the little girl, they are saying, born at an age when Madrid thought she would have no more children, and put her up for adoption “for 500 lempiras” (about $125). The lawyer doesn’t want to be interviewed. De Nazar seems flustered.

She insists the lawyer acted in good faith in this case, which is erupting around her desk. The American couple, unfortunately, is waiting out their paperwork at home after visiting Tegucigalpa, naming the child and buying her clothes. De Nazar decides to keep the baby girl in the national orphanage until the mess can be straightened out.

“This is a very rare case,” De Nazar asserts. But she admits that the Adoption Department doesn’t have the personnel, funds or mandate to thoroughly investigate where the children come from. “That responsibility rests with the lawyers. Ours begins only when the child enters the adoption process.”

On paper, the procedure that leads to De Nazar looks clean and orderly, if pricey. Most of the time, an American couple hires a licensed American adoption agency for fees ranging from a donation of $1,000 or so, as Suzanne and John made, to $10,000, as in Cathy Dickenson’s case. The agency engages the required Honduran lawyer, whose fees are paid separately by adopting parents and run as high as $7,000 (as much as a lawyer who does not handle adoptions can make in a year). The lawyer collects documents by mail from the prospective American parents, authenticates them, finds a baby eligible for adoption, sometimes pays for the birth mother’s expenses (Gabrielle’s mother received medical costs from Suzanne’s lawyer, plus $112), then notifies the new parents to come to Honduras for the final paperwork at De Nazar’s office and court appearances. The court rarely denies an adoption approved by De Nazar’s department.

In practice, the process is messier. Sometimes in the rush to get the parents to Honduras and begin receiving fees, a lawyer sends a photo of a baby, the excited Americans arrive, but the baby doesn’t materialize. That is what happened to Cathy Dickenson. “I had a kind of miscarriage right there,” says Cathy, who then waited in a gloomy hotel room for the lawyer to produce another child.

Messiest of all, says Family Court Judge Teodolinda Pineda de Aguilar, is “the moment when the baby is delivered” to the adoption market.

Sometimes the babies come from women who have decided that they simply can’t afford to take care of another child. Sometimes--in a country where low technology and high illiteracy make record keeping an imperfect science--they are stolen, as Lilian Madrid claimed. Most of the time, the transaction falls somewhere between free choice and coercion.

Neither the Honduran government nor the U. S. Embassy tracks this part of the process. As De Nazar explains, obtaining the babies is the province of the attorneys. And Honduran adoption attorneys have a lousy reputation. The attorney for Cathy Dickenson and Sue Cagle comes to their hotel room instead of inviting them to his office because his law partners don’t want it known that one of them deals in the adoption business. The U. S. Embassy, which puts out a packet of adoption information, advises would-be parents to motivate their Honduran lawyers by paying “as little up front as possible.”

At the pool one day, Sue Cagle says she would like a toddler, too, and, if she started paperwork now, she might finish about the same time as proceedings for her infant girl. But she doesn’t want to suggest it to her lawyer: “I’d be afraid he’d go and steal one.”

Sue has the right idea, although the act would probably not be outright kidnaping. Instead, a lawyer might use a “locater,” whose job it is to find pregnant women on city buses or in poor neighborhoods and make them offers. “There are women who look for pregnant women and charge for this,” Judge Pineda says. “The one who receives least is the mother. The lawyer makes sure he washes his hands--he has to keep himself looking clean.”

The practice of “buying” babies for resale--or snatching them from maternity wards, by some accounts--resulted in the creation of notorious “fattening houses,” where adoption brokers fed and stockpiled babies until they could find lawyers with clients. Although the government cracked down on the fattening houses in highly publicized raids a few years ago, no one is in jail for paying off women to give up babies, and no one is in jail for selling her baby. And no one denies that the brokering process continues.

It is difficult, of course, to prove that babies have been sold to lawyers or their locaters. In fact, there is the finest of lines between helping a dirt-poor pregnant woman with the cost of having her baby--a legal transaction in Honduras as in the United States--and simply paying a price. “Baby selling went on in the past, but now I don’t think people deliberately go out to sell babies,” said a U. S. Embassy official who monitors adoptions. “Rather, it’s more like, ‘I can’t feed the other children. Can you help me out a little?’ ”

De Nazar describes the murky lead-up to adoptions this way: “A lawyer can go anywhere and see the misery and say to a pregnant woman, ‘I’m going to let these children study, and you can’t even keep them from dying of hunger.’ ‘OK,’ the mother replies, ‘I’ll give it up.’ ”

“It’s very difficult to say whether the women I see in chambers have been paid or not,” adds Pineda, one of two judges who makes the final ruling in adoption cases. “I’ve got suspicions about certain lawyers, but I can’t prove anything. No one has ever brought me a receipt.”

The shadowy origins of the babies being adopted here seem to trouble no one, least of all the adopting parents. And it seems clear that as long as there is crushing poverty in some places and baby shortages in countries where couples have the means to go abroad to adopt, babies will continue to be commodities traded from poor countries to rich countries.

“It gives me sadness and frustration that my own government can’t do anything to protect these children, but if they stay here, what can they hope for?” Pineda asks. “To live in the street? To sniff glue?”

SUZANNE’S FIRST SIGHT of her husband, John, in Honduras is through a window at the airport. Suzanne has been here a month, and the rains have finally come. John is here to meet the baby, but also to take Suzanne away for a while because this is all taking too long. He walks purposefully from the airplane--handsome silver-gray hair, blue blazer and chinos. He carries two weeks’ worth of Pampers, a Mickey Mouse blanket, a bottle of bubbles. Suzanne has moussed the baby’s hair.

In the taxi, kissing, laughing, John holds Gabrielle the entire way back to the hotel.

“She looks like she’s been bitten,” he says, noting that the child’s left eyelid is partly closed. Then, without missing a beat, he adds, “Well, if it’s not all right, we’ll make her all right.”

He announces that he saw a documentary on Mayan Indians in Honduras on the Discovery channel and sent away for it because he wants the baby to see it some day. But at the hotel, he is gazing at Gabrielle as if for the first time. “Boy, she really looks like an Indian--she’s got that round face.”

“All babies have round faces,” Suzanne says.

“She’s pretty dark,” he says. “But at least her hair is the right texture.”

Suzanne looks appalled.

“I’m not prejudiced, Suzanne, honey. But I’m not a hypocrite, either.”

Out of his realm, thoughtful and good-hearted but forgetting to be tactful, John says what he is thinking. One evening by the pool, John says his and Suzanne’s Ohio neighborhood is very white, and he feels that a child who looks black would not fit in. He is not alone: Of dozens of white adopting parents I have interviewed in three years, almost all said they would consider adopting a Latino child abroad before a black child at home.

The process is not going perfectly. It is not what Suzanne envisioned as she prepared meticulously to adopt--back in the world of clean application forms, home studies by licensed agencies and musings over Beatrix Potter wallpaper and pastel mini-blinds. Besides, John has already raised three children in his first marriage, and friends have always admired John and Suzanne’s lifestyle--traveling, enjoying life “together 24 hours a day,” as they like to describe it. What happens now with an infant in the picture?

Suzanne worries, and tensions build. John wants Suzanne to get away from Honduras with him for 10 days while the paperwork proceeds. But Suzanne has become the baby’s mother almost as surely as if she had gone through the birth process itself, with its release of chemicals and passionate instinct to remain close. Also, she has heard about things going terribly wrong when an adopting mother leaves for a while, about birth mothers reappearing to claim their babies. By law, Suzanne cannot take the baby out of the country yet, and she does not want to place Gabrielle in the hands of baby-sitters or in the national orphanage where Gabrielle is supposed to remain if Suzanne is out of the country.

John wants to lighten the scene. “I’m going to hang a bow and arrow on her wall.”

“No, you’re not.”

“As long as she grows up to be tall and thin. I’ll give her stretching exercises. Pretty eyes--so dark and impenetrable.”

John wants to meet the birth mother, to see what she looks like, to ask her what kind of man the father is and what illnesses there may be in the family. He is an orphan himself, and he has faced unanswered questions all his life. He wants their lawyer to set up the meeting immediately.

“If you do that, I don’t want you to take the baby, not in a thousand years,” insists Suzanne, alarmed. “I don’t want her to know where we are living, nothing.”

John leaves Honduras a week later, without Suzanne and without having met the birth mother, who was never available, according to their lawyer.

Most of the women at the pool feel the same as Suzanne does--they have a resistance to knowing about the birth mother that borders on superstition. But when she meets Carol Anderson, a single adopting mother from California, Suzanne hears an echo of her own husband’s need to know.

Carol’s lawyer told her how the mother of her new child, 2-year-old David, died at age 39 of a heart attack. But Carol finally met the benign-looking 77-year-old man her lawyer introduced as David’s father.

“He said he really loved David, but he was old and poor, and he didn’t work steadily in his job as a stevedore, unloading ships,” Carol says. “I felt compassionate. About how hard his life was and how hard it must be for him to give up his son. I want them to know each other. He asked me to send pictures and whether I would come back to visit. I hope he lives long enough for David to know him some day.”

Back in Los Gatos, Carol, vice president of a chain of child-care centers, had taken foster children into her home for a decade. Finally, she said, “I needed someone I don’t have to say goodby to.”

But American adoption officials like to place “normal” children in “normal” two-parent households. “I could have adopted a blind 13-year-old but not a healthy young child,” she says bitterly.

In fact, Carol wanted two children because she always “liked it best when I had two foster kids.” Her hopes soared when she received news about two sisters, ages 1 and 3, waiting for her. In a counterpart of Cathy Dickenson’s “miscarriage,” Carol’s hopes fell when she learned the toddlers’ mother decided not to relinquish them. Finally, Carol’s lawyer produced David and a 2 1/2-year-old, pixie-faced girl named Sara. Carol admits she doesn’t know how the lawyer found the kids.

Outside, the rain falls in powerful sheets, cutting down pool time, turning dry paths in the hill neighborhoods into muddy sloughs. Inside her hotel room, Carol watches the children sit at a table and eat devoutly. All the green vegetables, every last grain of rice. Sara, whose smile is ready but whose teeth are black from inadequate nutrition, wets her finger to pick up crumbs from the table. Carol wishes one of them would point to a glob of food, grimace and say, “I don’t want that.”

But they do not. They eat as if full plates may be a temporary condition.

After two weeks, Carol rids David and Sara of lice. She rubs cream on their rough feet every day and indulges their obsession with shoes and socks, helping as they put them on and take them off again and again. Occasionally one child or the other bolts from the glossy educational card game Carol has laid out on a table and runs to flush the toilet or switch on a light, just for the wonder of it. Then they return, content, play the game and call her “Mama.”

“Before I left California, some people asked me whether I felt like a white imperialist going down to steal brown kids,” she says. “I tell them, considering so many die before they’re 5, it’s possible I’m saving one from death and two from illiteracy.”

It is a feistiness that will serve her well in weeks to come, as time begins to drag, people begin to seem “not overly friendly,” and the legal process snags. Shirley Williams, Sue Cagle and Cathy Dickenson have gone home with their babies. Suzanne and Carol are left to trade stories like trench buddies whose paths might never have crossed at home.

After two months, the downpours stop. It is the canicula , the beautiful but unsettling tropical season of dry breezes and clear heat between the two fierce halves of the rainy season. But the weather holds little interest for Suzanne or Carol. Endlessly, it seems, watching their children grow without any other loved ones to witness a first smile or new words, the women wait.

FROM COLONIA GUILLEN, a working-class barrio tacked into the rutted hills, the hotel pool is simply a glint in the hazy urban mass far below. This is the kind of neighborhood where Sara’s and Gabrielle’s birth mothers might have lived. Where houses are made with found boards and tin cans hammered flat to make a wall. Where there is no running water in the houses, and women wait in long lines at curbside taps to fill buckets for cooking and washing.

From the perspective of 55-year-old resident Eva Romero, life for women is the same as it was 30 years ago. Eva’s mother had 19 children, of whom 12 died. Eva had 11; five died. Her daughter-in-law, Maria del Carmen Lanza, listens carefully but doesn’t talk, minding her three children, cooking on a wood fire under a bare bulb in one of the three rooms where 14 members of the extended family will sleep tonight.

“In the countryside, we had no mill, so we had to grind our corn by hand for tortillas. But here in the city, there is less food for the children, and everything costs. So like I say, it evens out,” says Eva, wiping the runny noses of two toddlers. “The same.”

At least in Eva Romero’s house, some cash flows in from her working sons. Where there are no working men, families struggle mightily just to eat.

Maria Incarnacion Diaz has five children, ages 5 to 15, who sleep on two beds in a tiny, dirt-floor house that fills with smoke daily when she makes 200 tortillas--which the children help sell two for a penny. They all eat; a 38-cent soup bone in a pot of boiling water was lunch the day I was there. But there is no surplus money for things like shoes or school fees. To strangers, no one in Colonia Guillen will admit to having put up a child for adoption, just as no one will admit to having had an abortion, which is illegal. Nevertheless, everyone claims to know someone who has experienced these sad, unsavory events.

“No, I’ve never had an abortion myself,” says Norma Isabel Rosales, a 30-year-old single mother of four. “But I do know you don’t go to a doctor, because it costs too much. You just look for someone who can do it, who uses a probe with a needle at the end.”

What about the pain? “Whatever you can get--aspirin, malaria tablets, rosemary.”

Of a dozen women I talk to in this barrio over a couple of days, only one has used a contraceptive, which can be expensive. More important, the powerful Roman Catholic Church hierarchy considers artificial means of birth control anathema.

But in this society where machismo is not yet a thing of the past, the most common response one hears when asking why a woman doesn’t use contraception is simply “He wouldn’t like it.”

Across town, there is an Episcopal church shelter for 75 boys on an old estate: the Home of Love and Hope. An administrator, American Deborah Agnew, says that if the shelter had more room, there would be plenty of children to fill it. The Home of Love and Hope is an alternative to adoption, taking in street children or children whom families simply can’t afford to feed . It is one of the few shelters of its kind in Honduras, and, according to Agnew, part of its goal is keeping Honduran children in Honduras, training them in skills that will enable them to make a living in their own country.

“Most of our kids come from young, single mothers who have jobs like digging sand or making tortillas,” says Agnew. “Fifty percent of them would give up their kids, they feel so powerless. But we believe the children can grow up to be good Hondurans, or we’d be adopting them out.”

Hondurans don’t adopt many children themselves (19 last year), at least not officially, but nevertheless they often say they don’t like to see Americans taking their babies away, probably never to return. Sometimes adopting mothers think they see resentment (“Just the way people look at you,” as Shirley Williams puts it), and they feel stung at ubiquitous graffiti: “Gringos Out.” That message is more likely directed at 1,000 American troops stationed here and at the influential U. S. Embassy, which is funneling about $200 million in non-military aid to Honduras this year, amid a popular perception that ordinary Hondurans have nothing to show for it.

Nevertheless women say their American adoption agencies provide guidelines: Always have a smile on your face when walking down the street. Wear skirts or dresses, not pants, and nothing sleeveless. Don’t run in groups.

On the street, bizarre rumors are spawned by the sight of foreigners with dark-eyed children, by scare stories in the newspaper or by a vision of wealthy outsiders that is envy mixed with a kind of helpless indignation. Foreigners are taking the children to exploit them. They resell children abroad. They open stomachs to smuggle drugs. Or the most recurrent: They use the children for body parts in transplant operations.

Maria del Socorro Velasquez, who is 39, sidesteps all this fear and apocrypha, the luxury of those who don’t have to think hard and quickly about what to do with an unborn child. In the presence of Agnew, whom she knows, Velasquez confides that she wants to find a lawyer who will pay expenses and provide someone to adopt her unborn infant.

At the church shelter, she is washing clothes, reaching over her protruding stomach to rub shirts and underwear against a concrete slab with a bar of soap. It doesn’t matter if the new parents take the child out of the country, she says. Her husband is an alcoholic, she is often ill, her employers in the house where she works as a maid (earning $20 a month) won’t let her bring a baby, and she already has two boys in this shelter, where she works once a week and visits them.

“I don’t want to give up the new baby, but it’s worse if I die,” she says. “I can’t nurse, and I don’t want the baby to grow without milk.”

BY THE TIME Suzanne Lipps and Carol Anderson are ready to go home, several things have changed. Four or five couples arrive every Monday, and the number of these newcomers is expected to grow now that South Korea, for years the leading supplier of babies to the United States, has improved economically and imposed laws to stem the outflow.

Carol is leaving the country with her new daughter, Sara, but without David, who has been ordered returned to the national orphanage. The elderly stevedore, it turns out, was not David’s father. Relentless, Carol searched for a relative and found David’s grandmother, whom she brought “out of the jungle” to the hotel room, where the old woman sat numbed by her first brush with the city. But by this time, even grandma’s word that the child was an orphan was not enough.

“The judge was so pissed off at so many irregularities, he wanted David back in state custody,” Carol says.

At the spare, understaffed orphanage, Carol and Sara (bearing cookies for the new brother she, too, bonded with after all) visit every day until they must leave for California, Carol in tears and David screaming in fear and incomprehension.

When Suzanne receives the final papers declaring Gabrielle hers, a kind of confidence blunts her anxiety over John’s demand to meet the birth mother. John has come to take his new family home and fairly bursts with pride.

“They’re mother and daughter now--you look at them and don’t dispute it,” he says. But he tells their lawyer that he won’t leave without meeting the birth mother.

The sky darkens as they wait around the pool on the appointed evening. Overhead, the last plane of the day flies out--the mountains caging the city make it too dangerous to fly after dusk. The green palms turn into black silhouettes, and the light globes around the pool form an imperfect line because some are broken. The birth mother doesn’t show.

John instructs the lawyer to tell the young woman that he will pay her 200 lempiras--about $50--to appear. That is more money than the birth mother, Celenia Mendez, 22, makes in six weeks in her job working 13 hours a day as a maid.

The next day, the meeting is tranquil, even healing. Celenia has a 2-year-old boy whom she believes she cannot support if she tries to raise him and his sister. She is passionate about the boy, Junior Antonio, whose father abandoned Celenia. The only time Celenia looks agitated is when she realizes that the Lippses are offering to adopt Junior Antonio as well if she ever decides to give him up.

Never, Celenia replies.

As they sit that last night amid heat lightning on the deck of the pool, Suzanne looks hard at Celenia, as if she is struggling with a decision, then rushes to get the words out before she can change her mind.

“Ask her if she wants to see the baby,” Suzanne tells a friend who is translating.

Later, John will say he felt fortunate that Celenia seemed so lovely and clear-headed and pretty. But he will think out loud again, saying that he feels guilty, wants to know why but finally is unable to put a name on his disquiet.

Suzanne thanks Celenia for the baby over and over, but later she will say there is no way to show her gratitude properly.

“How do you thank someone for something you’ve wanted all your life and couldn’t get?” she will ask. “This poor girl from Honduras gave me what nobody else could ever give me. Anything you say diminishes that.”

In the end, Celenia doesn’t cry, but Suzanne’s mascara has run and John’s strong face is a map of emotions. Nevertheless, Celenia can’t seem to take her eyes off little Gabrielle, whom she had named Mary Celenia. She touches the baby’s bare thigh.

“Tell her I would have liked to have stayed with her,” Celenia says. “But I couldn’t because of my economic situation. Not because I didn’t love her.”